Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2)

by Plame, Valerie

  As she punched in the key code, she heard the soft murmur of voices coming from inside. At almost the same time the door opened and she found herself face-to-face with Chris Arvanitis.

  He beat her to words, saying, “Damn, Vanessa, you look worse than I feel.”

  She gave him a quick hug. “I’m happy to see you, too,” she said simply.

  “Ditto,” Chris said, his expression serious.

  “I have so much to tell you,” she said, shrugging out of her damp jacket and hurriedly draping it on a hook of the old-fashioned coat rack. She was reenergized by Chris’s presence. “I just came from the site and a walk-through with Marcel Fournier, but I had—”

  She broke off as Hays appeared from the living room carrying two steaming mugs. He held them out in offering. “Very hot, very bitter coffee.”

  Chris took one and Hays pressed the other into Vanessa’s hands before reaching around her to nab his coat off the rack. “I’m on my way over to the Station. They have a possible match on your bomber—and we’re going to put a rush on the analysis of some DNA taken from the site—they’ve got better toys, so I’m out of here.” He two-stepped restlessly toward the door.

  “Let me know the instant you find out anything on the bomber’s ID,” Vanessa said. “And Hays, I heard that a fourth victim died?”

  “A forty-two-year-old man,” Hays said soberly.

  Vanessa nodded wearily. So not the girl. Yet. She stood on tiptoe to give Hays a quick hug. He blinked in surprise, but his smile was the last thing she saw as he closed the door.

  As the lock clicked in place behind Hays, Vanessa turned to Chris. “Give me one minute?” She was already walking toward the apartment’s third bedroom—hers—index finger raised to signify “one.” “And make yourself at home.”

  Alone, she dropped onto the neatly made bed and covered her face with her palms. Hays had put a damper on her first impulse to tell Chris everything, beginning with her call from Bhoot. Now she’d had time to second-guess that. What if he declared her burned and pulled her off the team? He had the power to do that. She ran her hands from her face across the top of her head, smoothing her hair back. Her cheeks stung where debris had cut her skin. She found a few Advil she’d left on the bedside table and she gulped them down with a stale glass of water.

  What the hell am I getting myself into?

  But now wasn’t the time to give in to doubts. She had to follow her instincts—they’d led her this close to Bhoot. And she wouldn’t lie to Chris again. She had let him down before by withholding the truth about her relationship with her colleague David Khoury. The awfulness of her betrayal still stung. But their professional and personal relationship had survived. She respected Chris enormously and thought of him as a true friend—rare enough in general, but even rarer in her world.

  She pulled a weathered Moleskine notepad from the drawer and found a pen on the floor. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and after a moment, her hand began to push the pen rapidly across the page, using her own version of shorthand to write down her conversation with Bhoot.

  —

  “ACTUALLY, YOUR ‘ONE MINUTE’ lasted eight minutes, twenty seconds,” Chris said, when she found him in the living room, seated on the worn silk loveseat.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Glad you missed me.” She took the chair next to him, setting her now lukewarm mug of coffee on the antique side table between them. They were alone in the apartment, with the white-noise hum of computers punctuated by the syncopated drip from the leaky kitchen faucet.

  Chris shifted position on the loveseat so his knees almost touched Vanessa’s. He studied her intently—Phi Beta Kappa and Mensa; the look lasted a matter of seconds, but still she almost squirmed. In her pocket, Bhoot’s phone pushed uncomfortably against her thigh. Where to start?

  He beat her to the punch.

  “We’ve heard from the analysts who’ve been going over the video of your asset’s execution. Their very preliminary call: It was videotaped outside Paris, probably in a rustic outbuilding at a rural location where a gunshot would barely register—” He glanced at his watch. “Roughly twenty-two hours ago.”

  Quickly calculating in her head, she asked, “How could they know that already?”

  Chris eased his position, but he still stayed rod-straight; he worked out, pumped weights, kept more than fit and ready. He chose his words with care: “You know they can magnify the light in a subject’s eyes one thousand times and pick up all sorts of reflections . . .”

  “So Farid was already dead when I was waiting to meet with him.” She wasn’t asking a question, so Chris stayed quiet.

  She lifted the mug toward her mouth. “No report of a body dumped somewhere?”

  “Not yet, no match.”

  She nodded briskly, trying to convey professionalism but feeling empty. “Right.” She set the mug down again, coffee untouched. She let the painful feeling pass, looking back at Chris just as he shook his head.

  He said, “I’m sorry that we’re here again—with another loss. Truly sorry, Vanessa.”

  “One part of me thought the deaths would stop now that the Chechen’s dead, but another part knew . . . this is a nightmare.” She turned her face toward the French doors to the balcony that overlooked the front courtyard and the street. A slice of the rainy darkness beyond the glass showed through where the drapery edges didn’t quite meet. When she spoke, her voice was a rocky whisper. “Have you noticed that everyone I touch turns up dead?”

  “Don’t talk that way.” He lowered his voice. “You’ve proven who was behind everything that happened last year.”

  “At what cost?”

  Bhoot’s whispered question replayed internally: “You do realize that we’ve both been betrayed?”

  For much of the past three years, CPD had focused resources on Ghost Hunt—the operation aimed at unraveling Bhoot’s massive network and unmasking his identity.

  And over the last year, she’d felt the heat and excitement of the investigation and the sense the team was drawing closer to identifying him. Following the Chechen’s trail, Vanessa and CPD discovered executions dating back years—and most important, they’d been able to find a money trail implicating Bhoot as the mastermind behind those assassinations.

  But those wins were accompanied by human losses, which were pinned on her.

  “Hey . . . Vanessa.”

  It was Chris, prompting her back to the present.

  She blinked, turning her focus outward again. “We still don’t know who is passing our ghost his information so he can compromise my ops.” Even with a full-time Agency task force bent on finding a mole, they hadn’t ferreted him—or her—out. And Vanessa knew as well as Chris that the Agency’s track record on finding moles quickly was, in a word, dismal.

  Chris raised one palm. “Give them time to get results, Vanessa.”

  “We don’t have time!”

  Vanessa’s thoughts were racing now, her mind filled with too many questions to allow her to make connections. She stared at Chris. “Why me?”

  Chris frowned. “I know it feels like you’ve been singled out—”

  “No, I mean, why me? I have been singled out. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to set me up. They kidnapped my asset and sent a double so . . . so I’d get blown up, too? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t, and I don’t like any of it,” Chris said. “You sure you want in on Team Viper?”

  “I can’t believe you’d even ask that question.”

  He scrubbed one hand atop his buzz-cut hair, a habit when he wasn’t at ease with his own thoughts. “We’re going to have to declare you to the French.”

  “Shit,” she breathed. Her career was careening everywhere—from highs to lows to potentially nonexistent, and it was hard to keep up and sort it all out.

  “It’s an order from Headquarters and I don’t see any way around it, I’m sorry. After today, after everything that went down last year, you’re too inside of
this whole thing.”

  Resistance sparked through her even though she knew he was right. It wasn’t a step Chris took lightly—every time an ops officer is declared to a foreign service, her effectiveness is diminished—they both knew that. She picked at the edge of her sweater, but her eyes stayed on him.

  “The best we can do is stick to first names,” Chris said, staring into his coffee mug. He made a face, looking around restively. “Is there anything stronger?”

  Without a word, Vanessa walked the short distance to her room to retrieve the half-full bottle of Blanton’s from the side table. She also collected her lighter and an unopened pack of Dunhills, pushing them into her sweater pocket.

  As she returned, she held up the bottle. “Hey, look what I found. And I haven’t collected this particular stopper yet,” she added, referring to the distinctive series of unique bottle plugs. She knew it was a little juvenile, having a collection of anything, but it amused her. It also connected her to her father’s memory; Blanton’s had been one of his favorites.

  As she poured three fingers of bourbon into each of their mugs, Chris eyed the bottle appreciatively. “Either the French have seriously upgraded the amenities in their safe houses, highly unlikely, or—”

  “This is my personal upgrade from a little shop down the street.” She managed a lopsided half-smile. “Glad you’re here.”

  “Glad you’re alive,” Chris responded—but his eyes went to her hand that held the drink. She was shaking so badly the amber liquid shivered up the sides of the glass.

  Vanessa clamped her free hand on her wrist. “Sorry. I’ve managed to keep it together all day until now.”

  “I’d be worried if you weren’t shaking after everything that happened. You are, after all, human.”

  She bit her lip and nodded as Chris clicked his glass against hers. He took a slow sip, watching her as she swallowed half the glass of bourbon. It went down tasting of fire and honey.

  Vanessa set her mug hard on the pitted, stained wood of the Beaux-Arts table. “So that’s that . . .”

  She knew it was pointless to argue. She would survive the declaration—at least it meant she was officially on Team Viper, in spite of possible pushback from Fournier. And indeed, if the French had placed more than one bug in the safe house, she’d been declared anyway.

  “Chris, there’s something else . . .” She said it slowly, tiptoeing verbally so that he looked up, frowning. She could no longer put off the subject of Bhoot’s phone call.

  “I already know I won’t like this.” He gave her another look, brown eyes narrowed to slits. “Shit.” He pulled something from his pocket—the blue-beaded amulet on his key ring. It provided protection against evil, according to his Greek yia yia, grandmother, and Chris’s philosophy was, Why not cover all the bases?

  He said, “Go ahead.”

  Vanessa quickly topped off the bourbon in her mug. She shot it back, almost inhaling down the wrong pipe, coughing to recover. She pulled the notepad from her back pocket, set it down, tapping the shorthand notes she’d scrawled there.

  Chris shook his head when she held up the bourbon, the offer of another pour. “C’mon, Vanessa, now you’re stalling.”

  Her fingers had contracted into fists and she relaxed them with effort. Already in too deep.

  She dug into her hip pocket and pulled out the phone she’d wrapped in her scarf. “I wanted to trash this—but maybe, just maybe, Hays can work a miracle and get something off it.”

  “What is it?” Chris asked.

  She carefully placed the phone on the table, locking eyes with Chris as she mouthed, Bhoot.

  She stood and gestured to the French doors to the apartment’s balcony. “Come on outside, I need a smoke, and I don’t want to stink up such a beautiful safe house . . .”

  Physically bracing himself, Chris shook his head. What?

  But he followed her outside onto the balcony.

  She tapped one from the pack, picked up the lighter, and clicked to flame.

  “I thought you quit,” Chris said, tone quizzical.

  “I did.” Vanessa inhaled like a diver coming up for air. She held the smoke in her lungs for seconds before she exhaled slowly. “I do. Regularly.” She reached under the neck of her sweater to her upper left arm, nudging the edge of a Nicoderm patch and ripping it free.

  “What the hell,” Chris said, “I’ll have one, too.”

  Ignoring Chris’s request, she leaned close to whisper to him. “Bhoot contacted me.” She mimed putting a phone to her ear. “Three hours ago.”

  “I can’t believe this, Vanessa!” Chris slapped the wrought-iron railing with both palms. “I expect the unexpected from you, but Christ . . . how the hell?”

  “At the site after I went back with Fournier.” She kept her voice quiet. “I was leaving and a kid handed me that phone, said it was for me.”

  “And you didn’t run like the devil?”

  She stared at Chris, her head tipped, waiting for him to catch up to her reasoning. She’d known he would react strongly to this news. For CPD’s primary target to contact an ops officer directly for a chat was unheard of. Not to mention very dangerous.

  Chris’s fingers tightened around the iron railing. “What did he want?”

  “He says he is not responsible for today’s events—”

  “And you believe him?”

  “I didn’t say that—I don’t believe anything he says—but I don’t know. Just listen for a minute. He referenced that our government damaged his interests. But then he said that someone else has taken what belongs to him, that he’s been betrayed. And he said True Jihad—their bombing—is a diversion.” She sucked in a breath, a stolen moment to reorient. “So, Chris, my takeaway is this—the nuclear prototype we believe Bhoot smuggled out of Iran before the bombing? Someone stole it from Bhoot.”

  “Holy shit,” Chris whispered.

  “Uh-huh.” She tapped her cigarette against the balcony railing and ashes fell into darkness.

  They both stood in silence, considering the possibilities, the what-ifs—none of them good.

  After a long minute, Chris said, “Let’s go back to the phone call. What did he want from you?”

  “Okay . . .” Beginning a different conversation, Vanessa knew, about Bhoot’s motivations—and possibly her own. “He wanted to enlist me,” she said, slowing down to move with her thoughts. “Under the guise of giving, he wants something in return.”

  “He wants your help—and what else?”

  “My help and . . .” She shook her head, closing her eyes against the flash of recall, the sense of violation at Bhoot’s questions, his prying . . .

  Already she felt herself censoring what she could reveal to Chris—it was always that way in her work, having to think about what she could say to whom, never quite relaxing, but this was worse.

  “Goddamn it, Vanessa, in front of my own eyes, I can see you fall into his trap. He singled you out, you feel special, and it’s all pure manipulation.”

  Chris looked at her, but really he was lost in thought—registering what some sort of alliance with Bhoot might gain for the investigation. “What else did you get from the call? What proof it was him? What did he sound like? Could you record him?”

  “No, not quick enough.” Still on her feet, she closed her eyes, pulling nicotine deep into her lungs. It felt extravagant to smoke again. “Maybe he used a Skype link or something like it and the effect was whispery. He had a British accent. I’ll bet a hundred euros it’s real. But, then again, the precise way he pronounced the words makes me wonder if he’s ESL.” Her words flowed out with the stream of exhaled smoke.

  “Listen, Chris. I’ll transcribe my notes so you can read them. The last thing he says is a bit cryptic.” She checked herself, returning to a whisper. “But I’m sure it’s a reference to Dieter Schoeman. He wants me to make contact—maybe Dieter knows about True Jihad . . . maybe he knows who stole the device.”

  “If it was even stolen,
” Chris said, almost spitting out the words. He calmed himself, speaking quietly again. “All of this could just be Bhoot’s diversion, a way to throw us off track as he brokers some deal.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But what if Bhoot is telling the truth?” Vanessa’s fingers closed around Chris’s arm, and she whispered to him: “Someone betrayed us both—he used those exact words. So what if the mole has moved on from selling secrets to Bhoot? What if he’s selling them to True Jihad? What if that’s how they got their hands on Bhoot’s prototype?”

  “Whoa. A big what-if,” Chris said. “You’re running away with this based on no hard facts.”

  Vanessa moved restlessly around in the small space. “No, listen, the mole has to be involved—whether he betrayed me to Bhoot again or to True Jihad, my meeting with Farid was top-secret, so it’s just like last fall, the mole targeting me and my assets . . . except it’s not exactly the same.” She turned to Chris but barely saw him, she was so caught up in trying to track her way through the mental maze. “Okay, the mole exposed me, but if Bhoot isn’t lying—and my gut tells me Bhoot might be telling the truth about this one thing, about both of us being betrayed today—then the game has changed. I thought it was Bhoot’s mole, but—” She broke off.

  “If you’re right about the mole changing the game,” Chris said quietly, “and you better hope you’re not, then you’re caught between these two men, you’re right in the middle.”

  “Cat and mouse,” Vanessa murmured.

  “And you’re the cheese,” Chris finished. “But, Vanessa, this is all pure speculation,” he cautioned. “Until we prove what’s true and what isn’t, we are guessing.”

  But Vanessa didn’t hear him because she was still following threads. “So True Jihad . . . the mole is selling top-secret intel directly to these terrorists?”

  Chris shook his head. “Don’t get ahead of yourself—”